


The New Guy

by delgaserasca



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First meetings are awkward enough without one of the participants being caffeine-deprived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Guy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Femme (femmequixotic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/femmequixotic/gifts).



The new guy's first day in the office is noted in Tariq's mind like a brand as soon as Harry notifies them. In the interim there are the preparations for Ros' funeral, and the state remembrance for the late Home Secretary, not to mention Lucas' immediate promotion to Section Chief. He's almost surprised there's even going to _be_ a new guy (or New Guy, as Tariq thinks of him), especially as Harry hadn't given any indication of adding to numbers after Jo— But then, it would just be Lucas in the field and Ruth and Tariq in the office, and that's not a team, let alone a section.

Recruitment must love Harry Pearce.

They get the news eleven days before New Guy's arrival, and Tariq spends almost all eleven days trying to find out something about him. Word from HR is that he has some sort of military background, but that's about as much as anyone knows. Tariq can't decide if this means people are really good at their jobs, or really, really bad. It's called the _Secret_ Service for a reason, but still. Spies are the best gossips. They have more channels to funnel information through, and more ways of keeping it clandestine. Want to keep a secret? Hint: don't tell a spy.

Anyway – military, male, younger than Lucas. Right. Great. Lots to go on there. In an attempt to distract himself from the rising body count ("Don't exaggerate, Tariq." "People died before I joined, too." "They don't count on your tally." "What you're forgetting, Ruth, is that it's _my_ tally.") Tariq wonders what New Guy will be like. Scary, probably. Kill-you-any-ten-ways-with-his-pinkie scary, probably. Built like a house, probably. Tariq sighs and resigns himself to a working environment full of humanoid murder weapons. Like The Terminator, except— oh, god, _just_ like The Terminator! Everything about Tariq's life suddenly makes more sense.

"I work for _Skynet_."

"Did you say something?"

"...No."

Typical, then, that when New Guy arrives, Tariq is hip-deep in other people's incompetence. When he walks in that morning he finds his desk overrun with disconnected motherboards and no indication of where they came from or what they're doing there.

"Ah, yes." Ruth sticks her head around the door, stopping in her onward march to Harry's office with the Monday morning sit-rep. "Those came over ten minutes ago from Section B. Sam thought you might be able to help?"

"With what exactly?"

"...with those?"

Right.

Tariq is already none too pleased. He's half an hour later than usual due to strikes on the Underground, and his cousin moved out of their shared apartment over the weekend, apparently taking half the dishes and all of the coffee with him. The last thing he needs is to be playing Tetris with twenty-year-old tech that someone clearly yanked willy-nilly from a server downstairs. He's still got airport surveillance that Lucas handed to him last thing on Friday to trawl through, and all this before the morning's briefing at eleven. Oh god, he needs coffee.

Understandable, then, that he should forget about New Guy entirely until, twenty minutes later, Tariq realises someone is staring at him and probably has been for a while. There's a reason Tariq is behind a computer terminal and not in the field, and it's not just his tech wizardry. Looking up from his bench, Tariq knows he looks like the baby Asian version of Doc Brown. He's bent low to the worktop, magnifying lens attached to his left ear with a concentrated torch attached to it, and both hands grasping onto tweezers. There's a young guy standing in the middle of the grid, watching him with some interest. Nice jaw. Big hands. Buzz cut.

Oh, shit. New Guy.

New Guy, emboldened by Tariq's return to consciousness, seems to take this as an invitation to come over. That puts a tick firmly in the "nice guy" column, but they'll kick that out of him soon enough. Just wait until he has to microwave his first bomb, Tariq thinks, and then there's no time to cycle back from that thought and pretend to be engrossed in his work – which he is because he loves this job, as frustrating and odd and high-pressured as it is even when he's not racing against the clock and-slash-or being yelled at by Harry Pearce for not being able to turn off the internet - because the guy is _right there_ and Tariq is still two inches away from the table top. Not sure what to do, he freezes, rolling his eyes to look up instead of straightening the way a normal person would. Seriously. MI5 has slaughtered what few social skills he acquired at uni.

Not put off by Tariq's impression of a brick wall, New Guy puts his hand in Tariq's face. "Hi. I'm Dimitri." There's something going on with his face, but Tariq can't see from this angle, and he's still got both hands fixed firmly to the tweezers that he's using to rewire the circuit boards Section B somehow fried. He's trying to work out how to respond when he realises he's basically staring at this dude's hand. "Um. Hi?"

"I'm new," New Guy – Dimitri – says, as though that's not completely obvious. "Thought I would introduce myself as we're going to be working together." His face flattens. Oh, Tariq thinks, he was _smiling_.

Tariq reaches out to shake Dimitri's hand, belatedly realising he's still holding a tweezer. He drops it nervously, wincing as it clatters to the floor. He must look a little off-balance, twisted as he is, and still folded over the table, his brain not entirely in gear with the normal process of meeting new people. "I'm, uh— Tariq. Masood." He pauses. "One S, two O's."

Dimitri smiles again, a proper smile this time, not the half-baked attempt he'd made previously which, Tariq realised, had been more of a grimace really. "Nice to meet you, Tariq. Is there going to be a test later?"

"Pardon?"

"On how to spell your name?"

"Oh, ha, no—" God, Tariq thinks, stop smiling at me. You're really too pretty, and I haven't had any coffee. "Funny."

"I know, I know," Dimitri says. "You'll have to forgive me. Chalk it up to first day nerves."

"Sure." Tariq takes his hand back. "Lucas give you the tour yet?"

"Desk, chair, briefing room, photocopier."

This time, Tariq laughs when he's supposed to; Dimitri relaxes fractionally. "Sounds like he's covered all the bases. Coffee's in the kitchen, round the corner."

"Good to know." Shoving his hand in his pockets, Dimitri takes a look around. "Anything I need to know before I go to see Harry Pearce?"

Tariq speaks without thinking. "Gird your loins?"

The look on Dimitri's face would be comical if Tariq took pleasure in other people's misery but he remembers his own first day all too clearly, and how he'd spilled his first cup of coffee on Jo's shoes out of sheer nerves. And he hadn't had the benefit of a military career or age or social grace of any sort to help him along either. Dimitri seems like a nice guy, and he'd wandered across with the intention of fostering good will. It's just his poor luck that Tariq's relationship to social nicety is the same as to the Large Hadron Collider – he knows it exists, but he doesn't know how it works.

"Look, he'll ask you a few questions about what you hope to gain from being here, and what you think of the place so far. Just keep your answers to the point." Jo had told him something similar before his meeting, though she'd done so whilst cleaning her shoes, and gently prising the mug from Tariq's hands. "Harry appreciates the less-is-more school of thought."

"Dimitri?" Lucas makes an unexpected appearance at Tariq's door. His workstation is a popular spot today. "Ah, you've met Tariq. Good. Tariq, Sam said you can chuck those boards. He pulled them from the server Michael blew up on Saturday. Nothing to salvage from them." He turns to Dimitri. "Better get you to Harry. He appreciates punctuality."

"He appreciates a lot of things, apparently," Dimitri says, smiling in Tariq's direction. "Nice to meet you."

"You too," Tariq says. He watches as Lucas escorts Dimitri to Harry's office, then looks at the boards in his hands, the tweezers still on the floor somewhere. Looking closely at the edges, he can see where the boards have been singed, and—ah, there. Bullet hole. How the hell did he miss that? He sighs, letting the damaged circuitry fall to the table with a clatter, and thinking about Dimitri's smile. Probably not a terminator, if first impressions are anything to go by. "Oh god," Tariq says with feeling. "I really, really need some coffee."

  
**end.**   


**Author's Note:**

> This would have been more slash-y except I had to be able to finish this pre-deadline, and anything else would have turned into something monstrous. Poor Tariq. Poor Dimitri. Please assume a post-first-week drinks occurs. (Because it totally does.)


End file.
